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Kriti Agrawal was chasing the American Dream. She and her husband came to California from India three years ago with their young son. They landed good jobs in the Bay Area, she as a senior manager for a pharmaceutical company, he as a product manager in a financial-technology startup.

Living in Sunnyvale, Agrawal and her husband have watched their son thrive, his repeated illnesses from India’s pollution a distant memory. The couple were planning to buy a house. But like thousands of others here on a special visa for spouses of H-1B workers, Agrawal fears she’ll soon face a terrible choice: give up her career or get out of the country.

She is one of an estimated 100,000 foreign citizens working in the U.S. whose futures are caught up in the nation’s heated immigration debate, thrown into uncertainty by the federal government’s pledge to bar them from having a job. Since 2015, Agrawal and others with H-4 visas have been authorized to work in any field as long as their spouses are on track to get a green card. Now, she and other Bay Area H-4 holders wait and worry, wondering if the Department of Homeland Security will impose the work ban it has repeatedly promised since Donald Trump became president.

Kriti Agrawal, with her husband and 6-year-old son, spend time together at their home in Sunnyvale, Calif., Sunday, Sept. 9, 2018. Kriti works in the Bay Area under an H-4 visa with work authorization that may soon come to an end if the Trump Administration strips away the right to work from that visa. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

If the ban comes, Agrawal, 37, and her family will return to India because she isn’t willing to sacrifice her career, she says.

“I don’t know what to do with my son — what am I going to tell him?” she says. “He may have to leave everything he has here. He has friends here, he has a routine. For kids, it’s all about his friends, his school, his teachers. He’s very emotionally attached.”

It’s not clear when — or even if — Homeland Security will take action and whether H-4 workers would be allowed to continue working until their visas are up for renewal or barred from employment immediately. Talk of a ban has generated strong support among critics of America’s immigration policies.

“As far as we know, it is coming, it is inevitable,” says Sarah Pierce, an analyst for the nonpartisan immigration think tank Migration Policy Institute. “But we don’t know when.”

“We’re living in limbo here,” says Priya Yadav, 28, a strategy management contractor at Facebook who came to the U.S. last year, just 10 days after marrying her husband in India. “It’s a really, really bad and frustrating thing.”

At the root of the H-4 visa holders’ problem is the long wait for green cards, which can take decades for Indian citizens on the H-1B to obtain. Indian citizens make up the bulk of H-4 holders, because the vast majority of H-1B workers are from India. Because of the backlog, former President Barack Obama’s administration three years ago granted certain H-4 holders the right to work.

For Agrawal, who has worked in Holland, Russia, the U.K. and her native India, America’s recent immigration politics have come as a shock.

“We had always considered the U.S. as a country which welcomes immigrants, which treats people fairly no matter which country they come from,” Agrawal says. “This is my worst experience in terms of how immigrants are treated,” she says.

Her plans to buy a house are on hold, she says.

Anu Mahendran says she’s noticed a change, too. Now employed in Silicon Valley on an H-4 visa, she came to the U.S. from India in 2007, bought a house in San Jose with her husband in 2013 and had a baby boy a year ago. Until recently, she says, she felt valued and welcome as an immigrant. “I haven’t seen so much hatred as I have in the past couple of years,” says Mahendran, 34.

Ranjana Varadarajan, left, cooks dinner as her husband gets some work done in their home in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, Sept 6, 2018. Varadarajan holds an H-4 visa and her husband has an H-1B visa. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

A senior manager at a tech company, Mahendran and her husband, a software engineer, began exploring their options soon after the federal government first said in December that it planned to ban H-4 holders from working.

“We want to stay here. We’ve spent so many years here. We’ve built our home here. We’ve invested so much here,” says Mahendran, who first came to the U.S. on a student visa and has an MBA from UC Davis. But, she adds, she wants to work, not stay at home. “If the authorization is revoked,” she says, “we will move out of the country.”

This spring, she and her husband applied for permanent residence in Canada. They already have received approval, she says. Going back to India would be their second choice, she adds.

“Had I known the situation I’m in right now, I wouldn’t have moved here in the first place,” Mahendran says.

Mahendran, Agrawal, Yadav and others with H-4 visas find their lives ensnared in the complex political battle over workers imported to do specialized jobs. Federal authorities, following President Donald Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, have begun a crackdown on the H-1B visas their spouses hold, heightening scrutiny of applicants and increasing the rate of rejection.

Tech companies argue H-1B workers are essential if America is to remain competitive and have lobbied hard to increase the annual cap of 85,000 new visas. But critics point to high-profile reported abuses and charge that the H-1B is used to supplant domestic workers with cheaper, foreign labor. The Information Technology Industry Council, which represents Google, Facebook, Twitter and other major tech firms in Silicon Valley and across the U.S., has already come out strongly in support of keeping work authorization for H-4 holders.

Gayathri Chakravarthi, a recruiter for a Sunnyvale tech firm who is here on an H-4 visa, says she understands why some U.S. citizens think foreign visa holders take jobs that should go to Americans. “A lot of times H-1B is taken advantage of because of the kind of loopholes you can have in it, especially in the technical sector,” says Chakravarthi, who has made H-1B applications on behalf of her company. “A lot of us actually support tightening the H-1B application system.”

But many critics, she believes, fail to see the nuances in the visa system. “They’re only looking at one perspective, that I’m taking jobs away or H-1Bs are taking jobs away,” she says. “It’s almost racial — it’s profiled racially.”

Through her work, she says, she sees firsthand the struggle tech companies have in finding skilled workers. Her firm recently filled an open position for a software architect — after a two-year search, she says. “There’s such a dearth of certain skill sets in this country that we had to hire an H-1B. This candidate that we hired is being paid almost 25 percent more than a U.S. citizen or green card holder,” Chakravarthi says.

If H-4 holders can’t work, they will be faced with two serious problems, says Ranjana Varadarajan, an Indian software engineer who arrived in the U.S. last year with her husband, also a software engineer. A single income is not enough to live in the Bay Area, Vardarajan says. And the person on the H-4 would have to give up what for many is an essential part of a meaningful life: a career.

“I have joined a dream company,” Vardarajan says. “I was able to contribute to my family, and I was able to take care of my own expenses, take care of my parents because they have invested a lot in me. All that could be shattered.”

But UC Davis computer science professor Norm Matloff, who studies the H-1B, sees the H-4 as an element of a broader problem. “I do sympathize with the H-4s, but we are losing sight of the fact that the green card program, to which H-4 is tied, is too large to begin with,” Matloff says. “It was designed to remedy labor shortages, but it has gone far beyond that, and there are many displaced Americans as a result.”

Reed Davis says he’s one of those people. A Sunnyvale software programmer, he says he has applied for hundreds of tech jobs since he was laid off more than two years ago. Davis, who admits his expertise is in legacy systems and that he’s close enough to retirement to deter employers, says those applications netted him three in-person job interviews and one two-month contract. Even the work on legacy systems now goes to younger foreign nationals, Davis says.

Scrapping the H-4 work authorization is critical to protecting the domestic workforce, says John Miano, who represents American IT workers in a suit against Homeland Security that claims they lost their jobs to H-1B holders. Miano sees the H-4 as a way for the government to sidestep protections for U.S.-citizen workers. “It’s making it harder for Americans to find jobs,” Miano says.

Ethan Baron is a business reporter at The Mercury News, and a native of Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. Baron has worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and photographer in newspapers and magazines for 25 years, covering business, politics, social issues, crime, the environment, outdoor sports, war and humanitarian crises.